Friday, February 10, 2012

New interactive EPA carbon emissions database and map

The EPA just posted a new interactive database of stationary carbon emissions sources for the USA. You can look at emissions at the national, state, and local levels, as well as emissions data for individual emitters.

Here's a screen capture of the site, and some of the info you can find here. You can look at the data by four classes of greenhouse gases - CO2, N2O, methane, and fluorocarbons. You can also break the data out by the industry/source. There is a drop box to select a state, and once you are there, there is another drop box to select counties. At the top-right there is a button that you can click that will allow you do download the entire database as an excel file. Cool!

I was curious about how the ratio of carbon emissions in my state of Idaho compared to emissions nationwide. There is an easy to use set of buttons that generates nice bar and pie charts with one click. For example, here is the breakdown of carbon emissions for the USA (upper) and Idaho (lower):

It's easy to see that Idaho does not proportionally emit as much carbon from the production of electricity as the nation does...but we should remember that a fair amount of the electricity used in Idaho is actually generated in neighboring states, like Utah. And, Idaho also uses a lot of hydroelectric power. So this isn't a completely accurate picture. Anyway, Idaho's biggest emission source is "Other Industrial." This includes carbon emissions from food processing and other industry.

This is, as I mentioned, a fascinating site, and I look forward to poking around here more in the future!

1 comment:

Thanks for positing about this resource. I also want to spend more time poking around. I noticed that the Univ of Idaho wood chip power plant is not in the data. I wonder if this is because its small, or wood fired, or if its an omission.